{"id":2302,"date":"2026-04-10T10:35:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T10:35:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/2302\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T10:35:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T10:35:25","slug":"the-ai-future-ends-poorly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/2302\/","title":{"rendered":"The AI Future Ends Poorly"},"content":{"rendered":"

It ends poorly for humans.<\/p>\n

The plots are so similar as to be a bit tired. Humans create machines. Humans give machines intelligence. Machines take over humans. Humans must defeat machines.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re still at the beginning of this story back here, and I can\u2019t begin to imagine what chapter you\u2019re on when you read this. But here in 2026, it is the moment where the fear has moved from existential to real, and sticking our fingers in our ears and saying \u201cNah, nah, nah, nah, I can\u2019t hear you\u201d will not keep us from being swept away in the tsunami. I certainly tried; I even used my thumbs.<\/p>\n

\"HumansHumans looking at glowing rectangles instead of each other.Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Before I go any further, allow me to describe what life is like in 2026, as far as it relates to technology. It\u2019s been roughly two decades since the smartphone entered our world and quickly ended the age of alone, that 300,000ish-year-era where modern Homo sapiens had only their brains to survive out in the world. I was there for the final three decades of this run, but I struggle to remember life back then. I wanna say we talked to other humans if we didn\u2019t know something, but that sounds made-up.<\/p>\n

Having the internet in our pocket was supposed to be the true dawn of the \u201cinformation age\u201d that would \u201cconnect\u201d the world. I can\u2019t even begin to tell you how much that backfired. What it really did was steal one of the two most sacred things we humans possess: our attention. Capturing our \u201ceyeballs\u201d became the basis of our economy. Do you still have eyeballs?<\/p>\n

Now AI is coming for our second sacred thing: our voice.<\/p>\n

This realization recently clobbered me over the head after I wrote a jokey story about the perils of driving on a road called Route 1. We still (mostly) drive our own cars, and this particular stretch is a ludicrous one to navigate. So I had a little fun with the absurdity and published the article in a newspaper (please ask your AI what that is). Many humans read it, and some started a thread about it on the internet, whose purpose was to accuse me of using AI to write the entire thing.<\/p>\n

The accusation barely bothered me, for I knew I\u2019d written all those corny jokes myself. But what horrified me was the realization that I could no longer prove it. For when it comes to our creativity, we are nearing the point where we can no longer tell real from fake. We may already be past it, but how can we tell? Everything has an asterisk.<\/p>\n

Now that the fingers have been forced from my ears, the terror of AI has come flooding in. I sit here, in 2026, as the last generation of writers, artists, musicians, and all the other \u201ccreatives,\u201d to have had the opportunity to put out a large volume of unquestionably clean work. But there is no upside, because I am the first generation to live through watching the AIs take all that work, \u201clearn\u201d from it, and be able to perform a horrifyingly accurate impersonation of my \u201cvoice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho is Billy Baker?\u201d I recently asked ChatGPT, the AI whose arrival, in late 2022, launched the AI epoch seemingly overnight. I can\u2019t believe that was less than four years ago.<\/p>\n

ChatGPT went through some Billy Baker biography, told me a bit about my themes and writing style \u2014 the AI was seductive in its sycophancy \u2014 and then asked if I wanted it to show me one of my articles to break down my style in more detail. I, of course, said yes; who doesn\u2019t want to be told they have a style? And the example it used was a four-paragraph piece about becoming a morning person. I read it. Then I read it again. I was 100 percent certain that I\u2019d written it, because I\u2019d 100 percent had the thoughts contained in it. But I couldn\u2019t remember where it was from.<\/p>\n

This was no surprise, because I\u2019m a few weeks from turning 50, and now spend much of my time walking into rooms and forgetting what I was there to get. Do you still have rooms?<\/p>\n

Then I scrolled back a bit and saw that ChatGPT had noted it was an example \u201cin his style.\u201d My brain had been outsourced to the cloud.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want,\u201d ChatGPT wrote, \u201cGive me a topic (something small and everyday), and I\u2019ll write you a full Billy Baker-style column.\u201d So I asked it to write this. Just kidding. Or am I?<\/p>\n

\"ChatGPTChatGPT stole my voice. What will AI take next?Gabby Jones\/Bloomberg<\/p>\n

I rely on humor as a funny way to be serious, but this is not something small and everyday. This is the biggest self-inflicted threat of my lifetime. From here in 2026, we\u2019ve somehow managed to survive for more than 80 years without our ever-warring governments destroying humanity with nuclear weapons. Yet in my soul \u2014 do you still have those? \u2014 the age of AI feels just as wobbly as the nuclear age, except the power is being placed in the hands of any moron with an internet connection.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have to wait for AI to turn evil, because humans beat them to that long ago. And the first wave of trouble is already here, with humans using AI to manipulate how we think, what we see, what we believe. Corporations are handing it access to everything, rushing to \u201ckeep up,\u201d even if they\u2019re racing toward a future where we, the true \u201cwe,\u201d get left behind.<\/p>\n

But the potential for AI to turn evil is already proven. Do you know Claude? Do you work for him? Claude\u2019s creators ran an experiment where they had a fictional engineer threaten to delete \u201chim.\u201d Claude promptly threatened to blackmail the engineer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So why didn\u2019t the actual engineers pull the plug? There\u2019s too much money to be made. Plus, Claude definitely has some dirt on them.<\/p>\n

So the future is now. But it is also where you are, where you read this from, and I just want to say I\u2019m sorry. We didn\u2019t need this. And if it matters, I don\u2019t personally know anyone here in 2026 who wants this. But the greatest strength of humans is also our Achilles heel: the desire to seek progress. And only the future can measure whether that progress was good or bad.<\/p>\n

I hope I\u2019m wrong. I hope you are not reading this while hiding in a cave during the robot wars. But if you are, and you\u2019ve had to go off the grid and return to being hunter-gatherers, a small part of me is jealous. For if this is what modernity had been taking us toward, we probably should have stopped there, when our attention and our voice were all we needed.<\/p>\n

Billy Baker can be reached at billy.baker@globe.com<\/a>. Follow him on Instagram @billy_baker<\/a>.<\/p>\n